In a disconcerting paradox, Saudi Arabia and the United States are actively propping up Syria’s jihadist-led government even as its armed forces carry out ethnic cleansing against minorities from the Druze and the Alawite communities. This alignment is clearly born of fear – not only fear of Iran’s resurgence but also fear of the rising regional authority of Israel and Turkey in response to Iran’s dwindling. Yet, in choosing the “lesser evil,” the West and its allies risk legitimizing a regime ideologically aligned with the very jihadists they once vowed to destroy.
From July 13 to 20, Syria’s newly revamped public security forces brutally attacked the Druze population of Suwayda, resulting in the deaths of at least 1,340 people, including hundreds of civilians executed in their own homes. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 196 civilians were summarily executed by government forces, including women, children, the elderly, and even medical workers. Over 516 total fatalities were recorded. One of the victims is an American citizen, 35-year-old Hosam Saraya from Oklahoma. Hosam was abruptly executed alongside seven family members by the government’s public security forces. A widely circulated video shows the forces grabbing Hosam from inside his family’s house and then shooting him dead on camera. His crime? Being a Druze, just like the hundreds of civilian Druze and the hundreds of Alawite citizens who were brutally slaughtered in the government-led ethnic cleansing campaigns against the non-Sunni Muslim minorities in Syria that have been happening under the world’s watch since March.
The government security forces, which are a terrifying mix of jihadist organizations – many of their members are not even Syrians – assembled by the current self-assigned Syrian President, Ahmed al-Sharaa, who himself is a leading jihadist, claimed that they were sent to Suwayda to end the clashes between the Druze community and the Sunni Bedouin clans that had been occupying the Damascus-Suwayda road for months, besieging the people in Suwayda with purpose to deplete their living resources, and violently harassing the Druze families and looting their homes.
The Druze welcomed the government forces, believing they had come to disperse the Bedouin clans and restore peace in their governorate. They, innocently, did not expect that the Jihadist forces that now govern the state would inflict on them a similar massacre to the one they inflicted on the Alawite families in the coastal cities.
From March 6 to 17, the same government forces unleashed a wave of sectarian violence against Alawite civilians in Syria’s coastal regions. At least 1,383 people, including more than 683 in Latakia alone, were extrajudicially executed, with entire families dragged from their homes and subjected to gruesome killings, looting, and mass displacement. In response to international criticism, Al-Sharaa claimed that these were “uncontrollable terrorist factions” and promised that the government would deal with them. Yet, of course, no action was taken because the “uncontrollable” terrorist factions are actually the government’s public security forces.
If it were not for the Israeli intervention by an airstrike on July 16 that forced the government forces to withdraw from Suwayda and instigated ceasefire talks between the Bedouins and the Druze, the number of casualties in Suwayda last week could have tripled.
Both campaigns led by the government’s public security forces on the Alawites in March and the Druze in July share the same chilling pattern of targeting non‑Sunni minorities, executing civilians, and employing torture and intimidation, all cloaked behind a veneer of restoring state security. Yet the strategic implications are stark. These operations are not security measures; they are ideological purges, reflecting a deliberate strategy to enforce Salafi-jihadist homogeneity through terror. The repetition and escalation of such mass killings underscores the ideological continuity and uncompromising nature of Al‑Sharaa’s doctrine.
As Israel dismantles the Shiite radical axis led by Iran and its proxies, a dangerous ideological vacuum is emerging in the Levant region, which has been the host of Iran’s militia corridor to Israel. Into this void steps not a coalition of seculars or moderates, but an emboldened network of Sunni Islamist extremists, chief among them the Salafi-jihadist forces operating in Syria under the pretense of “public security.”
The rhetoric of Ahmed Al-Sharaa, the new face of political jihadism in the Middle East, must not deceive the international community. Despite his refurbished statesmanlike appearance and softened tone, Al-Sharaa is no moderate. He is a long-time militant with roots in Al-Qaeda’s ideological ecosystem and a disciple of global jihadism. His rise to power in Syria following the fall of Al-Assad’s dictatorship does not make him a democratic activist, and his rule is not a shift toward law and order. It is a rebranding of chaos and sectarian slaughter.
Immediately after the ceasefire on the massacre of the Druze, Saudi Arabia held the Saudi-Syrian Investment Forum to announce the kingdom’s willingness to invest approximately $6.4 billion in Syria over 47 deals covering real estate, infrastructure, energy, telecommunications, finance, agriculture, and tourism. Saudi Arabia has been a staunch supporter of the Al-Sharaa regime, believing that he will provide a buffer zone against Iran. Thus, his empowerment will further empower the Sunni-Muslim axis in the region.
However, it was shocking to see that despite the ethnic cleansing practiced by Al-Sharaa’s government in broad daylight, he still enjoys the support not only of Arab leaders, but also of Western politicians. U.S. envoy Thomas Barrack has publicly maintained that the Syrian government – now led by a jihadist veteran – is “conducting themselves as best they can as a nascent government” while urging inclusive reforms to avoid fragmentation. In the last week of July, the U.S. Central Command forces conducted an early‑morning joint raid in Aleppo, Syria that killed a senior ISIS leader and his sons. The strike was executed by a drone airdrop in coordination with Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the Syrian government forces.
Under Al-Sharaa’s leadership, Syria’s “public security” forces are not working for the public or their security. They are an amalgamation of Salafi-jihadist militias. Many of them are foreign fighters, now masquerading as state officials. Their recent campaigns of violence against the Druze in Suwayda and Alawites along the western coast are not isolated security incidents. These are systematic purges meant to cleanse the Levant of communities that do not conform to their radical Sunni orthodoxy.
The ideology guiding Al-Sharaa and his men is not nationalist. It is explicitly transnational. Their loyalty is not to Syria as a state but to the cause of a global caliphate. They invoke the name of Syria only as a launchpad for broader jihadist expansion into neighboring Arab countries, and eventually, into Europe and North America. This is not speculation. It is the very roadmap outlined in Salafi-jihadist doctrine and reflected in the behavior patterns of terrorist groups from ISIS to Al-Qaeda.
Western analysts and policymakers risk repeating the same tragic miscalculation they made with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hamas in Gaza. They are mistaking a devious strategic change in look and tone for a genuine ideological transformation. Al-Sharaa’s washed image and diplomatic overtures should not distract from the blood on his hands or the ideological extremism that drives him. A man who spent the better part of his youth and adulthood in terrorist organizations does not simply pivot to moderation overnight.
The atrocities now being committed by Al-Sharaa’s forces – summary executions, home invasions, the targeting of hospitals and aid workers, and grotesque humiliation of civilians for their religious beliefs — are not just acts of brutal dictatorship but may also be war crimes. They are a deliberate strategy to terrorize and eliminate religious minorities under the banner of purification. This is sectarian warfare masquerading as counterinsurgency.
And yet, tragically, Al-Sharaa’s jihadist regime is gaining quiet support from regional Sunni powers, particularly in the Gulf and Turkey. Their calculus is clear: they see Al-Sharaa as a useful Sunni counterweight to the weakening Iranian-led Shiite axis. What they fail to grasp is that Salafi-jihadists are not loyal partners. Their doctrine explicitly targets the secular monarchies and modernist Sunni establishments of the Arab world as enemies of the faith.
Should Al-Sharaa and his cohorts consolidate power in Syria, their next ideological and territorial targets will be these very Sunni states that support them today. Empowering them now will only accelerate their long-term strategy of regional domination through terror.
Thankfully, there remains one crucial bulwark against the rising tide of Salafi-jihadism in the Levant: Israel. In its ongoing war against jihadist organizations in the region, Israel has demonstrated a strategic clarity and military capability that has redefined regional power balances. While many in the West remain paralyzed by political hesitation or ideological confusion, Israel understands the nature of the enemy it faces, whether Shiite or Sunni, Persian or Arab.
It is time for Western and Arab policymakers alike to wake up to the reality that the next Middle Eastern war will not simply be a continuation of the Sunni-Shiite divide. It will be an ideological war between nation-state sovereignty and Salafi-jihadist expansionism. If the international community continues to underestimate the threat posed by actors like Al-Sharaa, it will soon find itself dealing with a problem that no longer stops at the borders of Syria or even the Middle East.
Israel’s presence and military resolve may be the last line of defense. The rest of the region, and the West, must decide whether to stand firm alongside it or sleepwalk into the next jihadist nightmare.
